A hundred years of war and peace by Mary Hoffman

The 14th Century ends quite neatly with the usurpation of the English throne by Henry Bolingbroke, after forcing his cousin, Richard ll to abdicate. It begins quite raggedly, with Edward l hammering the Scots and his son Edward ll inheriting the crown. In between came some of the most noteworthy events and personalities of the Middle Ages.

Tackling this huge sweep of history is Helen Carr’s new book Sceptred Isle. Her first – The Red Prince: John of Gaunt – was an instant bestseller. He was one of those larger-than-life characters, the richest person after the king, the hated trigger for the people’s revolt, the effortlessly fertile magnate who married his mistress and legitimated their four children, from whom many kings of England are descended. 

 

But Gaunt belongs to the second half of the century. The first part is still dominated by the conflict with the Scots. That ongoing war and the relations with the other enemy, France, have to play a part in any book about the fourteenth century, but this is essentially a history of a hundred years in England.

This is the century of The Wife of Bath and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Black Death and the Great Famine; The Fair Maid of Kent and the Black Prince; the Order of the Garter and the People’s Revolt; the creation of dukes; the Wilton Diptych and the first Speaker of the House of Commons; two minority monarchs, two depositions; tournaments and single combat duels; magnates and favourites; retinues and livery - not to mention two rival Popes! Helen Carr had her work cut out. 

Edward l

 

Edward I was born in the middle of the previous century and became king in 1272 in his prime. Nicknamed “Longshanks” for his unusual height (6’ 2” was way above average for a medieval man), he conquered Wales, got to work building defensive castles on the Welsh/English border and aspired to quell the Scots.

In this he was less successful, when finally he came up against Robert Bruce and his own mortality. Carr characterises the transition to his son’s rule: “When Edward l cast himself in the image of the legendary King Arthur, who united the Britons, Edward ll was destined to do the opposite.”

The stage is set for a complete change of culture. The first Edward wanted his son to continue warring with Scotland but the new king was more interested in making friends with male contemporaries, prime among them Piers Gaveston, the son of a Gascon knight. The young handsome king had no full brothers, only two much younger half-brothers by his father’s second marriage, no close cousins and a need for men to play sports with. He wasn’t fussy about their social class.

Gaveston, also young and handsome, was clearly a bit of a lout, inventing insulting nicknames for the nobles at court and given free rein by the indulgent king. He was exiled three times, first by Edward I, who disapproved of his influence over his son and again in 1308 and 1311 at the wish of the nobles he had insulted. But Edward ii had him recalled and the relationship resumed.

Helen Carr discusses this relationship in some depth, concluding, in disagreement with most modern historians (apart from Pierre Chaplais whose book on Gaveston, is not acknowledged), it might not have been homosexual but a “ritual brotherhood.” King Edward was married and sired children within and outside of marriage but that is neither here nor there where same-sex relations are concerned. (Gaveston had a wife and daughter too). 

Edward ll

 

This “friendship” certainly enraged the nobles, as much because of Gaveston’s rebarbative nature as his sexual preferences. Edward revoked all of his favourite’s banishments and had previously made him Earl of Cornwall, an equal to the nobles who accused him of treason. The Earls drew up a list of grievances, saying that the king listened to “evil counsel” and did as he liked, which was not in accordance with Magna Carta. (Helen Carr reminds us that it had been re-issued in 1300).

The end was inevitable. Gaveston was captured by the earls and was first in the custody of the Earl of Pembroke. But Pembroke returned home that night to his wife and the much harsher Earl of Warwick took the prisoner over. He was marched to Blacklow Hill and run through and beheaded.

The devastated king regarded this as murder and vowed vengeance on the earls. It was some consolation to him that Queen Isabella presented him with a son and heir – the future Edward lll. This is such a fascinating part of the 14th century that Helen Carr might have written a whole book about it and perhaps will. But, to jump to the catastrophic end of Edward’s reign, she writes about the continued enmity with the Scots, the Battle of Bannockburn, the new “favourite,” High Despenser the younger, the estrangement of the royal couple in spite of three more children and Isabella’s affair with Roger Mortimer.

Edward felt threatened not just by the adultery but by the political implications of their liaison. Isabella and Mortimer had been in France for over a year, with young Edward, when they raised an army to invade England and get rid of Hugh Despenser. They landed in September 1326 and, so hated was Despenser and so popular the queen, that London was soon in the hands of the invaders.

It didn’t take them long to track down the king and his favourite. The latter was given a full traitor’s horrible death and the king was kept a prisoner in Berkeley Castle. But, as Carr puts it, “The former king, though incarcerated, cast an uncomfortable shadow over Westminster and it was whispered that something had to be done to be rid of it.”

Within weeks the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales was crowned king in his father’s place, with Isabella effectively his Regent. Carr makes it clear that death of Edward ll by means of a red hot poker thrust into his bowels is a myth. It was likely that he was suffocated, thus having no mark of injury on his body as it was widely displayed after his death. For die he did, a year after his estranged wife’s invasion.

Mortimer, who took the title Earl of March, was now free to rule with Isabella as mistress and consort, even though he had no claim to the throne. But it was soon clear that the young king was a mere puppet and England had left the frying-pan only to fall into the fire. 

Edward lll

 

But young Edward lll was a stronger character than his father and soon found his mother’s hold over him irksome. By 1330 he had secretly written to the pope to support his freeing himself from Isabella and Mortimer’s coercion. Edward and a group of his young knights staged a coup while Mortimer and Isabella were together in Nottingham Castle together. The king let the armed conspirators in and Mortimer was taken. He was hanged naked like a common thief. Queen Isabella was held under house arrest, in very comfortable conditions for the rest of her life.

But we have reached only 116 pages of the main text’s 278 and there are seventy eventful years of the century left!

Edward lll ruled for forty years, he married Philippa of Hainault and they had twelve children, with five males living to adulthood, including the Black Prince and John of Gaunt. He was one of England’s most successful monarchs, in spite of the shaky beginning of his reign.

This review is in danger of being as long as Helen Carr’s comprehensive book, so I’ll just concentrate on the events that led to the second deposition of the fourteenth century. Edward lll’s older son is referred to throughout the book as the Black Prince, though this usage isn’t attested till over a hundred years later. He was first Edward of Woodstock, then Prince of Wales and was fully expected to be King Edward lV. And he had two sons, Edward and Richard. 

Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent

 

But things started to unravel when the Prince of Wales sickened with dysentery in Aquitaine. Then his older son died and he was left with the “spare.” He returned to England with his wife Joan (the Fair Maid of Kent) and his younger son but his health never recovered. He died before his father, the old king, leaving Richard of Bordeaux as the nine-year-old heir to the throne.

Edward lll, widowed and miserably treated by his mistress Alice Perrers, was a broken man and outlived his son by less than a year. So began the second minority rule of the century, with ten-year-old Richard ll on the throne. Like his grandfather, who had been a few years older, Richard had no official Regent, but John of Gaunt was his senior uncle and expected to advise him. It was the best Gaunt could hope for, as he was hated by the populace for his great wealth and the unwarranted belief that he wanted the throne for himself.

As Helen Carr says, “Richard was a child on his succession, and his boyish appearance, lack of an heir and impulsive behaviour kept him locked in a state of eternal youth.” This did not apply to his first cousin, John of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke. Born within months of each other and married only a few years apart, the two men couldn’t have been more different.

Henry was a champion jouster and soldier, Richard an effete lover of luxury; Henry sired four sons in as many years, Richard had no children. Henry had every quality to make a good king, except for one: he was not the heir. Richard had virtually none of such qualities – but he was the legitimate heir. As they grew older the two men kept out of each other’s way. But they had one tragic thing in common: they lost their wives in the same year, 1394.

Mary de Bohun had borne Henry two daughters after their four sons, dying in her last childbed. A week or so later Queen Anne died of the plague, having never even been pregnant. Both widowers were distraught. Though Henry’s loss is not mentioned in Helen Carr’s book; Mary doesn’t even get an entry in the index. Richard had the palace of Sheen, where his wife died, pulled down and Henry became even more restless than before; with the loss of his wife he had no permanent home. 

Henry Bolingbroke, lter Henry lV

 
The reign of Richard ll lasted twenty-two years but is hastily covered by Helen Carr, in comparison with her treatment of his greatgrandfather, Edward ll. It is difficult for the modern reader not to see these kings’ reigns and depositions through the prism of two great plays by Elizabethan playwrights, Marlowe and Shakespeare. Indeed, the book’s title is taken from the speech Shakespeare gives John of Gaunt in The Tragedy of Richard the Second.

Helen Carr suggests that Richard might have been suffering from “borderline personality disorder”: “the last Plantagenet king [sic] was a despot; when he could not command respect, he ruled with fear.”

There are a few strange statements in this ambitious book. For example, the author says that John of Gaunt was so distraught at the duel his son was to fight with Thomas Mowbray at Coventry in 1398, that he “stayed away.” She gives no source for this and Anthony Goodman, Gaunt’s biographer, states that he was in attendance. Helen Castor, thanked by Carr in the acknowledgements for her input, says he was seated next to the king; Carr herself in her earlier book writes “John of Gaunt was also present.”

Of course the new version may be correct but if you are going to contradict earlier accounts, including your own, you should surely cite some evidence?

The book is handsomely produced, with some elegant endpapers and comes with an index, which was lacking in the Gaunt biography. There is also an extensive bibliography, which readers will want to consult, to balance out some of Carr’s assertions.

Medieval Women (and a few men) by Mary Hoffman

 

 

The Middle Ages are having a bit of a moment, at least in the UK. This is a boon for me, as I am writing a "Plantagenet novel" covering the rough half century from 1352 to 1403. In January, I went to a day conference on Women of the Wars of the Roses, which is a bit after the scope of the first book but bang on the money for books two and three of what I see, somewhat ambitiously, as a trilogy. More in a couple of months when the first book should be finished.

The day conference, held in Southwark cathedral by Tudor Times consisted of six talks given by experts on six prominent women of the fifteenth century, four of whom were queen consorts of England. Since I have researched all these women, I was hoping to be surprised by one or two nuggets of information.

First up, Marguerite (Margaret) of Anjou.

From the Book of Romances 1445

 

The talk was given by Lauren Johnson, who has written books on Henry Vl, Henry Vlll, and Margaret Beaufort and she gave me what I hoped for early on. I should have known, but didn't, that among the many gifts the young Henry Vl showered on his bride, was a lion. What a wedding present! *

Next up was Cecily Neville:

Neville Book of Hours 1445

The talk was given by Joanna Laynesmith, whose book on the last medieval queens is now insanely expensive to buy on A*a**n. Fortunately, I bought it when it came out. Cecily was one of the two women discussed who did not become queen - though all Yorkists believe she should have. She had to be content that two of her sons, Edward lV and Richard lll were kings. I didn't know that she had been friendly with the Woodvilles in France, or that she had written a book of household management. She died a wealthy woman at eighty, so perhaps she was the winner in her rivalry with Margaret of Anjou, althgough the latter had the title.

Alison Weir talked about Elizabeth of York:

16th century image from Royal Collection

 

Alison told us that Elizabeth, one of the "good queens" and beloved of the people, might have had an iron deficiency. But if she told us the source, I didn't note it down. More research needed.

Elizabeth Woodville:

A copy of a portrait in Queens College

 

Melita Thomas, who wrote The King's Pearl about Henry Vlll and his daughter Mary, talked about this controversial figure. The first Wars of the Roses course I did in Oxford was taught by Lynda Pidgeon, whose subsequent book Brought up out of Nought did her best to rectify the notion that Elizabeth was a grasping, ambitious woman, out to get preferment for her numerous siblings. It is not completely baseless but more nuanced than many historians have seen it.

She was one of the most tragic of queens, losing her husband young and seeing her father, brothers and sons all put to death. Good to know that seven years after Bosworth, she was reinstated as Queen Mother.

Sarah Gristwood thought she might have drawn the short straw, being allocated to talk about Anne Neville:

Salisbury Roll 1483

 

Anne would seem to be the answer to "Who suffered most in the Wars of the Roses?" We know so little about Anne or what she thought of Richard as husband or usurping king. Their only child died and overwhelmed them both with grief, which shows a human side. As Sarah said, "Anne Neville was not a strong or powerful woman." But she is a good example of how heiresses are pawns in the hands of ambitious men.

Margaret Beaufort:

Meynart Wewyck 1510, Christ's College, Cambridge

So much has been written about this remarkable woman, both in history and fiction, that it was hard to see what was left for Elizabeth Norton to say about her. But she has written several books about Tudoe women and queens, including Margaret Beaufort. Her opening statement, that Margaret "did not kill the princes in the tower," was met with a resounding cheer that echoed round the nave of the cathedral.

She attended Richard lll's coronation gorgeously gowned in crimson, blue and gold, at odds with the image of her above, which is how she is usually thought of, as a single-minded and pious mother. She lived long enough to see her grandson crowned Henry Vlll but got food poisonming at the Coronation Feast and died.

I left the conference with sheaves of notes and too many books, energised that there was still so much to say and find out about these women.

Interlude with kings

Helen Castor, who wrote She-wolves: the Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth and has been a guest on the History Girls, has a new book out. The Eagle and the Hart is subtitled "the Tragedy of Richard ll and Henry lV." which is right on topic for what I am writing now. Before this the best book I knew about the first cousins born only months apart was Ian Mortimer's The Fears of Henry lV. It's a fascinatinmg topic: two boys, one born and raised in France, the other in England, both grandsons of Edward lll, both equal in royal blood and so different in their routes to the English crown.

 

Richard was in every way unsuited to be king, except one: he was the undisputed legal heir. His father Edward (known to later centuries as the Black Prince) predeceased Edward lll and Richard's older brother, another Edward, who never set foot in England, was also dead when Richard inherited the throne at the age of ten. Hopes were high, especially when the boy king rode out to face the rebels in what is no longer known as the Peasants' Revolt. It was probably his finest hour. But he had left his cousin Henry in the Tower to take his chances while other nobles were summarily executed by the mob. Richard did not go back for him.

Henry, on the other hand, was robust where Richard was effete, a champion jouster, a soldier, a traveller, an intellectual. He would have made a splendid king at any point before his usurpation. But he wasn't first in line. His father, the fabulously rich Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, was Edward lll's third son to reach adulthood. The brother in between, Lionel Duke of Clarence, had sired one daughter and her descendant married one of the York line, descended from Edmund, the next brother down. But could a woman inherit? There you have the crux of the Wars of the Roses, as it is still convenient to call them.

Henry was more robust in other ways too: he married Mary de Bohun when they were both young teenagers, having known each other since infancy. As soon as they were old enough to co-habit, they had a child every year, the first four boys. Richard married soon after his cousin, his wife his contemporary, Anne of Bohemia, and she never became pregnant. Both wives died in same year, 1394, Mary in giving birth to her sixth child, a second daughter. 

Was Richard gay? He certainly had "favourites," his relationship with Robert de Vere closer than friendship. When de Vere was exiled and died in France in a boar hunt some years later, Richard arranged for his embalmed body to be brought back to England. At the re-interment, the king ordered the coffin to be opened and, in one of his typically theatrical gestures, gazed upon his lost love's face and held his embalmed hand for the last time. 

But he was also very fond of his queen and had Eltham Palace razed to the ground a year after she died there of the plague. But it was different from the love between Henry and Mary, who made a new baby, every time he returned from his restless travels. It is doubtful whether the marriage was even consummated. And Richard chose as his second wife, Isabella of France, who was a five-year-old child when the marriage was first proposed. Richard's thirtieth birthday was the day after her coronation.

Was it a relief for him not to have to prove his manhood for another decade? We can't know, as he had been deposed and died long before Isabella reached puberty. She was not the grown woman Shakespeare shows us in his play. Her second marriage, to her cousin, Charles d'Orléans, showed she was fertile but she died in childbirth at the age of twenty, her daughter surviving. 

So there are women in the story of the rival cousins but mostly with sad stories. Death in childbirth was very common, even if you were the first lady in the land, with all the medical help money could provide. As Elma Brenner writes in the catalogue to the Bitish Library's Medieval Women: Voices and Visions, "Childbirth and its aftermath marked a moment of significant danger in the Middle Ages, with risks of great pain, infection and death."

She also tells us that Richard's queen in the year before her death bought plantain water, spikenard and theriac from an apothecary, These were all remedies for infertility so perhaps they had been to bed together but perhaps also she didn't at that stage know the facts of life. 

Most of the women in the exhibition, which finished last Sunday, were from periods before or after the one I am working in. But guess who turned up.

 

*The label tells us that this skull, found in the moat of the Tower of London, is that of Margaret of Anjou's lion! It has been carbon-dated to 1420-80, which is the right period. But it seems that Margaret brought the lion with her from France so it wasn't, after all, a present from her husband-to-be.  Presumably it was a lioness, rather than a male, but it lived in the Menagerie at the Tower and wasn't a pet being fed scraps from her table.

Don't worry if you missed the exhibition, as the catalogue is excellent. It covers women from from the continent of Europe, like Joan of Arc and Hildegarde of Bingen, as well as the home-grown Julian of Norwich and Margarets Beaufort and Paston.

 

 

Joan of Arc in 3D: a guest interview with Helen Castor

Photo credit: Chas Gibbions

We are very pleased to welcome our October guest, Helen Castor, well known to those interested in History for her book and TV series, She-Wolves. She is also famous on this blog for being the big sister of Harriet Castor, who has only just stopped being a History Girl.

This is what Helen says about herself: Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Blood & Roses, her biography of the 15th-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her last book She-Wolves: the Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth was widely selected as one of the books of the year for 2010. She presents Radio 4’s Making History and documentaries for BBC television, including a three-part series based on She-Wolves and, most recently, Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death.

Harriet: Thank you so much, History Girls, for this opportunity to come back and visit you! Thank you, too, for giving me this chance to interview my sister, Helen Castor, about her new book Joan of Arc: A History (published in the UK by Faber this month, and in the US by HarperCollins next May). You might think we’d have talked about Joan many times already… but the reality of busy lives – plus the fact that we live in different parts of the country – means that we don’t get the chance to see each other as often as we’d like, and so to have this excuse to chat about Helen’s new project has been a pleasure, as well as very interesting. You might accuse me of family bias (I can’t do anything about that!) but I can say with complete honesty I absolutely loved reading Joan; it is gripping, moving, and explains with vivid clarity the immensely complex and constantly shifting political scenes of the time, both in England and France – a huge achievement in itself, and one that succeeds in setting Joan the woman in her proper historical context.


Harriet: Your last book, She-Wolves – The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was about four medieval queens. How did She-Wolves lead on to Joan of Arc?

Helen: In She-Wolves I was exploring the constraints on female power in a world that expected its rulers to be male – and one of the most significant of those constraints was that women couldn’t lead armies on the battlefield. As I talked about the book, I kept finding myself saying, ‘The only woman who did lead armies on the battlefield was Joan of Arc – and look what happened to her…’.

And eventually it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what had happened to her. I knew the outline of her story, as most people do; but I didn’t really understand how she’d come to do what she did, or what she thought she was doing, or how those around her – friends and enemies – had reacted. Once those questions had occurred to me, I wanted to know more.

Harriet: Many books have been written about Joan. What did you feel still needed to be explored?

Helen: There are countless books about Joan – as well as plays, films, music, art – which meant that sitting down to write was a fairly terrifying prospect. But what I felt was missing was a book that told her story forwards, not backwards.

By that I mean that most books about Joan start with her in the fields at Domrémy, hearing her voices for the first time. But all our evidence for that part of her life comes from the transcripts of her two trials – one that condemned her as a heretic, and the other, held twenty-five years after her death, to clear her name.

And that leaves us with a problem. The trials took place when it was already clear what Joan had achieved, so the evidence they present is deeply infused with hindsight of one kind or another. And if we start with Joan in the fields, that hindsight is built into the narrative: it’s obvious from the start that she has an extraordinary destiny in front of her, so we’re already telling the story of the icon and the saint.

What I wanted to do instead was put hindsight aside as much as possible; to understand the war in France, and then to experience the shock of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl appearing from nowhere, claiming to be sent by God. Then, we can start the story by asking why on earth anyone would listen to her…

Harriet: What were the particular challenges of the research for this book?

Helen: I knew the fifteenth century very well, but almost entirely from the English perspective. So it was a challenge – and a fascinating one – to find myself in fifteenth-century France, within a civil war every bit as complex and brutal as our Wars of the Roses a few decades later.

Beyond that, the transcripts of Joan’s trials are deeply testing sources to use. Utterly absorbing, but never straightforward – the process shaped by medieval canon law and theology, the testimonies full of inconsistencies and contradictions, and many of the witnesses’ stories growing in the telling. Every time I go back to them I see new things.

 By Clément de Fauquembergue

(The only surviving image of Joan made during her lifetime: a picture drawn in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement by its notary, Clément de Fauquembergue, on 10 May 1429, the day when news arrived of the liberation of Orléans. He had heard that the Armagnacs were accompanied by a maid carrying a banner, but he had never seen her, and so depicted her with long hair in female dress).

Harriet: There seems to be a push, in the non-fiction history market, towards adopting a fiction-like style of writing. In this context, how would you describe your approach to writing narrative history?

Helen: For me, the point of writing narrative history is that it allows the past to be immersive. I’m trying to look through the eyes of the people who were there, to understand what they thought and felt – and that, of course, means there are many points of comparison with what writers of historical fiction are seeking to do. It’s crucial to remember that the people I’m writing about don’t know what hasn’t yet happened, any more than we do in our own lives; so any mention of what’s still to come, or of what later historians have said about their experiences, jolts us out of their world – and I try very hard to avoid that. Instead, all that contextual and historiographical discussion goes into the notes, where it can stand on its own terms.

So I suppose I’m saying that historical imagination always has to be at work in attempting to recreate the past – but at the same time there are boundaries to what I’ll allow myself to do. I’ll try to summon up a scene from all the available details in contemporary sources, or put flesh on the bones of my protagonists using every scrap of information I can find; but I won’t, for example, put words into their mouths. Most of the transcript of Joan’s trial is in the third person (‘she said that…’). Very occasionally something is recorded in direct speech – and those are the only moments when Joan speaks directly in my text. There remains the question of the accuracy of the notaries who recorded her words and translated them into Latin; but at least I can be faithful to the transcript.

Harriet: As you explain in the book, Joan wasn’t the only holy ‘simple’ person to emerge at this time. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

Helen: It can be tempting for us to assume, I think, that Joan’s exceptional career came about because she was a completely exceptional figure in her own time. Though she was extraordinary in many ways, it’s important to realise that God was present everywhere in her world, and that she wasn’t the only person – or the only woman – in late medieval France to claim that she heard messages from heaven.

What was unique about Joan was her claim that she’d been sent to lead the king’s army, which of course could be regarded as a miracle for as long as she was winning battles, but rapidly became a liability once the victories stopped. And, once she’d been captured, her own side adopted another messenger from God who was almost an ‘anti-Joan’: a simple boy, known as William the Shepherd, who carried no weapons but rode side-saddle, with stigmata on his hands and feet. He didn’t last long either… But if we understand the landscape of belief in which she lived, we stand a better chance of seeing what was truly remarkable about Joan herself.

Joan of Arc depicted in a 1505 manuscript.

Harriet: I had always thought of Joan’s adoption of male dress principally in terms of its symbolic value, but you point out that there were very important practical issues involved – not simply connected to horse-riding, but to personal security too. How much detail were you able to find out about this?

Helen: Her male dress appears to have started as a practical thing. When she set off for Chinon from Vaucouleurs, near Domrémy, the townspeople gave her a horse and an outfit of men’s clothes – which made complete sense, given that she would be riding across dangerous country for many days in the company of a small band of soldiers. But by the time she reached the Dauphin’s court, her male dress seems, for her, to have become part of her mission – an outward manifestation of the work she had been sent to do.

It’s very hard, though, to get a clear sense of what the balance was between the two – perhaps because they became so completely intertwined. At her trial, Joan said many different things about her clothes; she always defended her male dress, but not in consistent or completely coherent terms. Certainly, she was physically less vulnerable dressed as a man, because the cords with which hose were knotted on to a doublet offered some practical protection against sexual assault – and some later witnesses suggested that, during the three days towards the very end of her trial when she was dressed in women’s clothes, she was raped in her cell. We can’t know for sure; but it’s an important reminder of quite how vulnerable she was as a lone female prisoner in a castle full of soldiers who hated and feared her.

Harriet: Did your view of Joan change during your work on this project?

Helen: She moved from two dimensions to three. I felt I’d found the real person, standing squarely within her own world, rather than the icon who somehow escapes from history altogether. What I found particularly moving was coming to an understanding of her voices and visions that made sense to me in human terms. On the last morning of her life, some of her judges visited her in her cell in a last attempt, as they saw it, to save her soul. Some historians have completely rejected this part of the transcript as a fabrication after the event, but for a whole number of reasons that doesn’t convince me historically; and what Joan says during that meeting about her voices and visions – when she knows she’s about to die, and all her grandiose stories of angels and saints have gone – seems to me to have a real psychological truth. I’ve tried to leave room throughout the book for anyone who reads it to come to their own conclusions, but that, for me, was the moment when I felt I understood.

Harriet: She-Wolves became not only a book but also a series of BBC TV documentaries, which I know many readers of this blog thoroughly enjoyed (me included!). Can we hope for the same with Joan?

Helen: I’m working with the same director and producer and most of the same team – all of them brilliant – on a one-hour programme for BBC Two, to be shown sometime next year. We’ve just finished filming in France, following in Joan’s footsteps from Domrémy to Rouen – and one of the things we’re hoping to do, as well as going to all those glorious places, is bring the transcript of her trial to life as much as we can. It’s an exciting process.

Joan of Arc: A History is published in the UK by Faber & Faber, and will be published in the US by HarperCollins in May 2015.

She-Wolves: a review by Mary Hoffman

Not the speediest of reviews since Faber published the hardback of this fine book in 2010 and the paperback came out last year. But at that time my "history" shelves were bulging. Books on the history of medieval and Renaissance Italy, books on Shakespeare, books on the Plantagenet period of English history were beginning to engulf my study and I couldn't accommodate one more volume.

So I commissioned a new bookcase! (We live nowhere near an IKEA) When it came, after many false starts and alarums, books were collected up from every corner, shelf and box in my study (each book I am writing or planning has its own box, but that's another story) and installed in the new bookcase.

Then, and only then, could I buy She-Wolves but it was nearly my birthday and a daughter wanted to give it to me so I had to wait. And then like all writers, researchers and reviewers, I had to add it to the tottering heaps of the tbr.

Finally, I was able to open Helen Castor's book and from then on resented every moment I had to close it again. It is one of the most readable history books I have ever read.

It begins, unexpectedly, with the death of fifteen-year-old Edward the Sixth. But you soon see the relevance. All his possible heirs were female and England had never had a female monarch before.  But from here we go back to Matilda, the daughter of Henry the First and granddaughter of William the Conqueror and  see how close we came to it nearly four hundred years earlier.

It might seem extraordinary to us new Elizabethans, who are still fascinated by the first ruler of that name and live with the knowledge of the sixty-year+ reign of Victoria, but in 1135, it was by no means certain that the oldest son would inherit the crown, let alone a daughter. The conqueror was succeeded by his second son, William Rufus, even though his oldest, Robert "Cuthose" still lived. Robert was given the duchy of Normandy instead and for the next several hundred years the history of England and France are entwined.

Henry, the third son, when William Rufus was killed by a stray arrow while out hunting in the New Forest, nipped in quickly and got himself crowned king of England. But Robert and his son continued to contest his claim.

Oh, I must stop! It's all so fascinating. Matilda was gazumped by her cousin Stephen, who wasn't even the oldest son of the Conqueror's youngest son, but it was her own child who became Henry the Second when Stephen died.

And so on through the other medieval queens: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France and Margaret (Marguerite) of Anjou, who exercised what power they had through their husbands (respectively Henry the Second, Edward the Second and Henry the Sixth) and their sons.

The strangest is Isabella, who married at twelve a man twice her age and at their wedding banquet had to witness him giving away their rich wedding presents to the man sitting next to him, his favourite Piers Gaveston.  When Gaveston came to the inevitable sticky end, he was replaced in the king's affections by Hugh le Despenser but Isabella was older then and had produced a son, the jack in the pack that gave all these women a trump card to play with.

(Matilda's epitaph had been the "daughter, wife and mother" of kings).

From BBC website

By the time I read the book, I had already seen the associated BBC TV series. And if you saw and enjoyed that, you will get even more from the book. It's always great to get the visual references but I find all TV documentaries tend to re-iterate their points many times (a policy decision I'm sure) while an author is not so restricted in her text.

The TV series didn't use the framing device but Helen Castor brings us back very elegantly to Edward the Sixth's deathbed, after the story of the saddest queen, Margaret (Shakespeare's "she-wolf") who loses everything: husband, son and any hope of her descendants ruling England.

Edward's next heir should have been Mary Tudor but she had been declared illegitimate when Henry the Eighth divorced Catherine of Aragion and married Anne Boleyn.

Even more importantly, she remained attached to the Old Religion (since the New had robbed her and her mother of their rights) so Edward and his councilllors had come up with the bizarre Device that made poor Lady Jane Grey queen for just over a week and later led to the execution of this blameless political pawn.

Jane Grey was the granddaughter of Henry the Eighth's youngest sister Mary and her mother was still alive, but she was a Protestant and that made her the most acceptable of the possible female heirs.

But Mary was having none of it and it was she who became the first female monarch of England crowned in her own right. Because of the shortness of her reign, the lack of an heir in spite of two phantom pregnancies and most of all because of the bloodiness with which she pursued the short-lived restoration of her religious denomination, this important fact about her has sunk into neglect.

It doesn't help of course that she was succeeded by her brilliant, charismatic half-sister Elizabeth!

But I am grateful to Helen Castor for reminding me of this among many other important points about the history of women and the English throne.

HISTORY SISTERS by H.M. Castor

As Christmas draws closer and, with it, the prospect for many of family gatherings, I hope no one will mind if my post today has a family-related theme. This site has featured lovely posts by other History Girls about their first history teachers. Mine was my older sister Helen.

(above: The Writing Lesson by Albert Anker, 1865)

We are the youngest two of four children in our family, and are separated in age by just under two years. Whilst we argued and squabbled (and even on occasion fought) as much as the next pair of siblings, I formed the firm and unshakeable conviction at an early age that my sister was, well, where it was at. Her friends, effortlessly, seemed cooler than mine. Her talents were obviously the most worthwhile ones to have. And whatever Helen was doing or was interested in was, by definition, The Right Thing.

I have a distinct memory of Helen asking me – at the tender age when one ponders such questions – whether I liked gold or silver best (I think it was around Christmas time and we were contemplating sparkly pens). Gold, was my reply. Helen then revealed that she preferred silver. I remember quietly trying, really trying, to hang on to my liking for gold, even as the manifestly superior qualities of silver began to make themselves plain as day – its elegance, its sophistication…

You get the picture. So when I say that Helen was interested in history from an early age you will instantly understand how I came to find history fascinating too. I later followed in her footsteps by taking a degree in history, and now – though we have done some other, very different things in the last couple of decades – it is perhaps no surprise to find we’re both writing history books, albeit of very different types, since she writes non-fiction for the adult market. (No direct competition – which is both a relief and just as it should be: we are, at bottom, very different personalities.)

Feeling as I do that if it weren’t for Helen I might very well not have learnt to love history as early and as fervently as I did, nor perhaps have become a writer of historical fiction at all (since she introduced me to the authors who were my histfic heroines), I very much wanted to ask Helen what it was that drew her to history as a child, and what role historical fiction has played and continues to play in her love of the subject. I have therefore conducted a sibling interview, which you can read below.

But first, here’s my proud sister bit:

After studying for both her BA (in which she was awarded a starred First) and her PhD at Cambridge University, Helen spent several years as an academic historian (latterly as Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, of which she is still a Fellow). Now, however, she concentrates on writing non-fiction history books for a broader audience. She has been described by Saul David in BBC History magazine as ‘that rarity: a professionally trained historian who can write.’

(photograph © Chris Gibbions)

Her latest book She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, has won great critical acclaim both here and in the US, being described by Hilary Mantel in The Guardian as 'Highly readable, exciting and thought-provoking,' and by Kathryn Hughes in the mail on Sunday as 'Combining top-notch scholarship with fizzing storytelling ... a fascinating account of a group of women who refused to do what they were told and, in the process, paved the way for England's great female rulers.'

Her previous book Blood & Roses is a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, whose remarkable letters are the earliest surviving collection of private correspondence in the English language. Blood & Roses was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005, and was awarded the Beatrice White Prize by the English Association in 2006.

Helen is one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 4 series Making History. This year she made her debut as a presenter for BBC4 with a film entitled A Renaissance Education: The Schooling of Sir Thomas More’s Daughter. She has recently finished filming a set of three documentaries based on She-Wolves, which are due to be broadcast by BBC4 next year.

I must point out that, were Helen here with me as I’ve been writing all this, she would have been blushing and cringing in equal measure – she is one of the most unassuming and genuinely modest people I know! But now, without further ado, I will present the questions I sent her and her answers.

Do you remember how and when you first became interested in history?

Helen: I must have been about five, I think, when I read Jean Plaidy’s two books for children – The Young Elizabeth and The Young Mary, Queen of Scots. And I absolutely fell in love with history: the sixteenth century, to start with – there’s no one more charismatic than the Tudors – but then later I found my way back into the middle ages.

Why do you think history particularly grabbed you at that age?

What I always loved – and still do – is the combination of human experience with an alien-yet-recognisable world. That’s also why I love science fiction – but history’s even better, because it really happened… In those two Jean Plaidy books, I could immediately identify with Elizabeth and Mary, fascinatingly different characters though they were, but then the world in which they lived was so strange and glamorous and frightening and thrilling. I can still see every one of the illustrations in my mind’s eye…

Did you enjoy studying history at school or was history, for you, an outside-school interest?

I loved history at school. I would have loved it anyway, but I was lucky enough to have two wonderful history teachers who opened up the whole subject in the most exciting way. What history as an academic discipline has to offer is the forensic exploration of complex evidence – but because it’s complex evidence with human beings at its heart, that forensic exploration has to be infused with psychological understanding and intuition about individual behaviour and group dynamics.

And, because conclusions have to be expressed in written form, studying history is also a training in how to write clearly, coherently and precisely. Language is at the heart of the subject – which is why I think the process of studying languages is crucial for historians. Translating from one language to another is the best possible way of understanding a text from the inside – what’s unsaid as well as what’s said, and where the disjunctions come between different cultures. You couldn’t get a better training for reading a historical text than that.

Would you say that historical fiction played a role in fostering your enthusiasm for history as a child and teenager? (And if so did it do anything in particular in that regard?)

Without a doubt. Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time conveys an overwhelming sense of the excitement of the detective-work (literally, in her hero’s case) involved in historical research. And, given that a lot of academic writing is more concerned with analysing the past from a distance than reinhabiting it from the inside (if that makes sense), it was Dorothy Dunnett’s fiction that provided me with experience, rather than simply intellectual understanding, of the complexity, sophistication and unpredictability of the medieval and Tudor world.

Do you still read historical fiction now?

Yes, though selectively rather than omnivorously. I regularly re-read Dorothy Dunnett. Your book is wonderful! And Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety are extraordinary and utterly inspiring. I know I’m not alone in counting the days till Bring Up The Bodies is published.

Historical fiction has something of a bad name among some academic historians. David Starkey famously never reads it, Niall Ferguson has argued that it “contaminates historical understanding” and Anthony Beevor has expressed deep concern about novelists using real historical characters in their writing. What are your thoughts on this?

I’m a great admirer of some of David Starkey’s books, but I hardly think it’s a good idea to take everything he or Niall Ferguson says seriously…

Clearly, a lot of professional historians feel uneasy about (or actively hostile to) historical novels. I don’t, though. I think the presence of historical fiction can help keep academic historians honest – because, for all the care and rigour with which we need to treat our sources, we still do have to join the dots, to produce an interpretation of the past (and especially of human behaviour in the past) that we find convincing. The past is gone, and in attempting to summon it up in our own words historians are engaged in a process of creative writing – creative writing according to different rules from writers of historical fiction, of course, but creative writing all the same. And I think that the explicitness of the process of creation in historical fiction can be a useful point of comparison and contrast with what we’re doing; and also a reminder that it won’t do to treat our own protagonists as pieces on a chessboard rather than three-dimensional human beings living in a three-dimensional world.

Maybe that reminder is more necessary to someone like me, writing pre-modern history where it’s much harder to find the evidence on which to base three-dimensional characterisation. But I was very struck by reading responses to Wolf Hall that said, for example, that Hilary Mantel had got Thomas More ‘wrong’. That wasn’t at all how I’d seen it; I tend to think that human beings are extremely good at living in contradiction, which is why one person can summon up such contrasting responses in others. It seems to me that a reminder that the evidence for Thomas More’s life can be read in a multiplicity of ways from a multiplicity of perspectives can only be historically helpful.

Much more problematic, in fact, for me, are books which purport to be history, written for a general readership (and therefore not subject to the kind of academic reviews which would pick up on what I’m about to say), which contain glaring historical errors and pages full of footnotes (to give that sense of ‘referenciness’) that on closer scrutiny are meaningless because they’re so non-specific that they can’t be followed up. I’m all in favour of writing for a general readership; and I’m entirely conscious that we all make mistakes; and I don’t think you have to have footnotes at all, so long as you offer a gateway to the sources you’ve used through some kind of bibliographical discussion (as many popular history books and academic textbooks do) – but, whatever gateway you offer, if you’re writing history it does need to be possible to interrogate your evidence one way or another, rather than being led up a blind alley…

Do you think that the work of your favourite historical novelist/s has in any way shaped or influenced your own approach to writing?

Yes, I do. The history I write now is narrative history – storytelling – because that, for me, is the way to put human experience at the centre of my work. I try as hard as I can to see the worlds I write about through the eyes of my protagonists, without hindsight in so far as that’s humanly possible. (One of my self-imposed rules is never to use the phrase ‘little did he know that…’) I weigh up my sources as best I can and then tell the story as it makes sense to me, rather than laying out the details of historiographical debate, because – valuable though that is in other contexts – it immediately jolts me out of the historical moment and into the distant present. And I try to give a physical and psychological sense of the world in which my protagonists lived.

The best historical fiction, of course, is based on rigorous historical research; and the works of history I love most allow me to explore the worlds of the past from the inside – Thomas Penn’s Winter King being a wonderful recent example. There’s an utterly distinct but relatively narrow dividing line between the two.

What are you working on now?

I’m working at getting back to writing after the exhilarating and fascinating but very different experience of making some documentaries based on She-Wolves. And I’m afraid I’d rather not say out loud what I’m trying to write about – it’s still at too early a stage of gestation…

Completely understood! And many thanks.

She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, and Blood and Roses are both published in the UK by Faber, & in the US by HarperCollins.

Helen Castor's website is here.

H.M. (Harriet) Castor's website is here.